A Snapshot of the Inside of an Atom

Now this would have been a fundamental breakthrough if it would have been done many decades ago. These days, we have extremely high confidence in our theoretical/computational models of the wavefunction of atoms and molecules. "Just as valuable for developing quantum intuition in the next generation of physicists?" Naah, this stuff has been well-known since before most of us were born.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to belittle this accomplishment - it's all kinds of cool that they pulled off this experiment in the first place, and notwithstanding the huge body of other experimental evidence, it's a beautiful direct confirmation of longstanding quantum mechanics theory. And as mentioned in TFA, provided they can scale this up to larger and less well-understood systems than the hydrogen atom, it might make it possible to obtain unique data on nontrivial materials like molecular wires. The only problem I have is that the Science editor is overselling it a bit; at the end of the day, it's not going to change our quantum mechanical worldview the slightest.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/NYDvg7u5nU4/story01.htm

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